Posts Tagged ‘Turner Galleries’

One of my favorite pieces in the National Gallery of Victoria is Édouard Manet’s 1880 work The Melon. At around 13 x 17 inches, it’s a modest study of a rather warty specimen, but I’m always tickled by the addition of an ornate gold frame far too large for the humble painting. It’s this incongruity that always draws me back to the gallery whenever I[…..]

Early in 2013, six Australian artists made a pilgrimage of sorts. They left a sweltering southern summer for the gray frigidity of London, where they spent three weeks working on-site at the Freud Museum; Susan Flavell and I were among their number. At the museum, we encountered the shrine-like space of Sigmund Freud’s study, preserved as it was in the final year of his life,[…..]

Australian artist Andrew Nicholls dredges the queasy aesthetics of sentiment for its submerged ideological content. In an ongoing thread of his practice, he locates the ideals and practices of British imperialism in the kitsch, seemingly innocuous world of 19th- and 20th-century ceramics, disrupting this historical narrative with traces of the otherness otherwise repressed in the imperial worldview. He subsumes his viewers in an unsteady undertow[…..]

Anna Nazzari’s exhibition Horse Play at Turner Galleries presents the losing game, and the dogged impulse to try again, as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. With a nod to the absurdist existentialism of Albert Camus, Nazzari’s games, which are impossible to win, allude to the futile quest for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. For Nazzari, this nightmarish scenario provides the ground to[…..]